Views on Mideast challenged

Re “Most Back Israel, Split on U.S. Role,” Times/Bloomberg Poll, Aug. 3

The poll confirms what many people suspect: Most Americans are ignorant of what is really going on.

Let me first say that I believe Hezbollah was wrong to cross the Israeli border and kidnap soldiers. However, the remark comparing lobbing rockets from Mexico into the United States with what Hezbollah is doing does not really tell it as it is. In the current war, it was Israel that started lobbing rockets into Lebanon. Hezbollah has in the past fired rockets into northern Israel unprovoked, but we are talking about this war.

The killing of civilians, the purported “investigations” by the Israel Defense Forces and the foregone conclusion that it is the fault of Hezbollah that these civilians were “mistakenly” killed don’t mean anything to these people. Some of your respondents should have looked at the reports by Human Rights Watch about the killing of Lebanese civilians.

TONY AWAD

Doha, Qatar

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I was puzzled by one point in the story about your latest poll. You report that 43% of respondents said Israel’s bombing campaign was justified and not excessively harsh. You also report that 16% described Israel’s response as justified but excessive, and 28% said the response was unjustified, but you left it to your readers to do the math.

It seems to me that the featured conclusion should have been that 44% of the respondents thought that Israel’s response was either excessive or unjustified, while 43% thought it was justified and not excessive. But that would not have been a very good support for your headline.

JOHN MOUKAD

Cambridge, Mass.

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“I feel badly for Israel. They don’t run around looking for trouble,” The Times quotes a respondent. Yeah, like where did all of those homeless Palestinians dodging Israeli bulldozers in the camps come from anyway? Oh, that’s right -- they “left voluntarily.” The battle for the hearts and minds? Game over, at least in the United States.

TIM CLARK

Los Angeles